Brilliantly Conceived Zombie Holocaust Flick

Rating: 8/10 (30 June 2003)

People......people who eat people.....are the luckiest people.....
So what would happen if they crossed "Night of the Living Dead" with "Twelve Monkeys" and "The Pianist" (yes! "The Pianist!")? Well, here's your answer, and as you might expect, it ain't for everyone. Still, it's pretty f***ing brilliant no matter which way you cut it. The nifty little thing about Boyle, is that he really didn't make a zombie film. He's made a casualties of war survival film. Sure there's plenty of zombie gore to please the hardcore genre fans, and it comes early and in the bucket-loads. Also, to the film's advantage, all the gore is the old fashioned kind, i.e. there ain't no CGI here, folks (something that really hampered a film like "Resident Evil").
But real film fans will enjoy the emotional complexity, surprisingly engaging character development (which is way deeper than any horror film has the right to be) and the shocking "survival at any costs" theme that undercuts the entire film. You'll be hard pressed to find a horror movie with more endearing or "real" characters. Another refreshing aspect is that all of the humor (something every good horror movie needs in moderate doses) arises from realistic interactions amongst the characters. Nothing here is an "in joke" or overtly self-aware (like "Scream" and all its knockoffs). The film takes itself pretty seriously, and has some serious things to say about human nature and survival. When it gets down to it, how far would you go to survive? To protect your loved ones? To find hope? You had no right to expect a horror flick to be this deep or emotionally devastating....until now. Will horror films ever be the same? It's hard to tell so soon, and especially since the apocalyptic zombie stuff is so derivative (that will make it easy for detractors to dismiss the film). And while the herky-jerky digital camera work is used effectively here, it's another trend that most find annoying in films, and that could hurt how folks regard this movie in the future. I think it's got the long clean lines of a classic...but only time will tell...and as long as the zombies don't get us first.